Earlier this year, the American Psychological Association voted (at last) to ban its members from participating in interrogations at U.S. detention centers, including the notorious Guantanamo Bay. This marked a major shift from its previous stance, which permitted work with interrogation (some of which is known in certain circles as “torture”) despite the fact that both the American Medical Association and the American Psychiatric Association have banned any affiliation with the practice for years.

So what’s different about psychologists, that it took them this long to decide that participation in torture wasn’t something the field should strive for? Stanley Fish at the New York Times blog “Think Again” offers the following explanation:

One answer can be found in the A.M.A.’s explanation of its prohibition: “Physicians must not conduct, directly participate in, or monitor an interrogation with an intent to intervene, because this undermines the physician’s role as healer.” The American Psychiatric Association is even more explicit: “Psychiatrists . . . owe their primary obligation to the well being of their patients.”

Psychology, on the other hand, is not exclusively a healing profession. To be sure, there are psychologists who provide counseling, therapy and other services to patients; but there are many psychologists who think of themselves as behavioral scientists.

It is their task to figure out how the mind processes and responds to stimuli, or how the emotions color and even create reality, or how reasoning and other cognitive activities are affected by changes in the environment. Their product is not mental health, but knowledge; their skills are not diagnostic, but analytic.

Fair point, though it doesn’t really weigh the fact that ethical considerations govern all scientists, psychologists or no. From the Stanford experiment to the controversy surrounding self-experimentation, scientific discovery has never operated on a separate, removed level from human rights. Certain behaviors—such as torture—could very well provide valuable data for psychologists, and maybe even lead to breakthroughs in the field. But do the potential benefits outweigh the ethical landmines of participation (at least through silent concession) in human rights violations? Put another way: Do we really have to condone torture to learn about the human psyche?

Comments (76)

Ted Strauss

The characterization of psychologists involvement with Illegal Interrogation practices as “ethical landmines” is inaccurate. A landmine is something with a risk of exploding. But, as the Senate Armed Services Committee report by Senator Carl Levin released today makes clear, as well as many earlier documents, psychologists willfuly engaged in unethical practices. There was no roll of the dice, no ambiguity about the implications of their acts. Psychologists systematically designed and implemented interrogation practices that are clearly abusive. By abusive, I am talking about psychologically torturing a person for weeks or months on end. The only reason this issue is presented as a complex ethical debate is that the Bush administration wrote legal memos to redefine torture such that having a a medical professional (including a psychologist) present during the interrogation meant that any act against a detainee does NOT count as torture. They coordinated this legal loophole with the people running the prisons so as to shield themselves from blame. Senator Carl Levins report exposes these lies, this abuse. Read this report here- http://levin.senate.gov/newsroom/supporting/2008/Detainees.121108.pdf
It is understandable to want to think of ethical issues as complex and debatable, where each side of the debate has fair and reasonable arguments. This issue is not so complex though. Torture and abuse is wrong wrong wrong. Scientists have no special status in relation to such acts.

The APA created a committe to write its policy that was designed to be controlled by the Dept of Defense and Military Intelligence. It provided APA materials to those government agencies as it voted to seal the activities from APA members. Defense Department officers from Guantanamo, Iraq and Afghanistan had voting bloc control of the Presidential Ethics and National Security Task Force. In essence, APA’s leadership allowed the organization to be placed under the control of a military operation that procedeed to write APA policy to provide cover for interrogation psychologist. It is a red herring to propose that psychologists’ non clinical roles makes them some how morally heterogenous with regard to interrogation compared to physicians. The DoD interrogation psychologists were directly involved in harming people; expertise in “learned helplessness” is even listed as a job prerequisite! This experience was not a matter of fine line, or shades of gray–APA leadership charged headfirst into the darkness.

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